Wayne Thaxton is uniquely qualified to teach his two sons about driving.

A crash investigator for the Gwinnett County Police Department, Thaxton has seen repeatedly what can happen when teen drivers make bad decisions.

But he can't teach them everything, which is why he admits he is still "scared to death" when they take the wheel.

"You can't show your son what it feels like to hydroplane. You can't let him know what it feels like to go too fast into a curve," he said. "When you're calling on a deity to help you out of this mess, that's the experience I'm talking about."

A month ago, Gov. Sonny Perdue signed "Joshua's Law," which mandates that teens seeking a license before the age of 17 take a driver's education course. It will take effect Jan. 1, 2007. Effective July 1, Joshua's Law also will begin to generate funds to establish driver's training courses for teens around the state with a 5 percent surcharge on traffic fines.

The law, as well as a recent spate of teen driving fatalities, has generated discussion of how best to equip such drivers for the road.

While both the Georgia House and Senate overwhelmingly passed the bill, some experts question the benefits of driver's education. And even driver's ed supporters recognize that the required 30 hours of classroom training and six hours of in-car instruction aren't nearly enough to prepare teens to drive.

"There's a lot of parents under the impression that if they take that course, they can turn the kids loose and they're fine," said J. Barry Schrenk, president of Taggart's Driving School. "That's just not the case."

Taggart's is licensed to administer the state road test, and Schrenk sometimes tells parents of children who have passed it that he would not get in a car driven by the teen.

According to Schrenk, about 4,000 teens take Taggart's driver's education program annually in the Atlanta area. The road instructors aim to teach basics such as parallel parking as quickly as possible in order to advance to lessons on driving in the city and on expressways.

Said Schrenk, "Most people don't get involved in serious accidents while parallel parking."

The work of Taggart's and other driving schools prompted Thaxton and others to support Joshua's Law.

"It's long overdue," said Cobb County police spokesman Cpl. Brody Staud. "I think driver's ed and driver's training are probably two of the most important things. You've got to get practice, especially around here. What if your parents are horrible drivers and they're teaching you everything you know about driving?"

However, others knowledgeable about teen driving point to research that has shown that youths who take driver's education classes are no less likely to crash than those who don't. Research has even suggested that advanced driver safety classes, such as those that teach skid control, can increase the likelihood of a crash, perhaps because they give drivers a false sense of confidence.

Lessons: Boon or bane?

Earlier this month in Stone Mountain, BMW sponsored one such program for teens in which they practiced pulling out of a skid, crash avoidance and using anti-lock brakes to come to a sudden stop. Few drivers realize that anti-lock brakes allow the driver to maintain steering control while braking.

Casey Ackerman, an account executive for BMW's marketer, said that while students and parents loved the program, one could argue it gives teens false confidence in their abilities.

The program benefits teens, however, because "they're learning techniques" that when mastered could prevent crashes.

Susan Ferguson, senior vice president for research at the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, understands the appeal of driver's education, but does not think it is the answer.

"I have no objection to people taking driver's ed to learn basic skills," she said. "I think it might be useful to do that. But when people sell it to you as, 'You need to require it because it'll improve safety and we need taxpayers to do this,' there is no evidence for that."

Where driver's education supporters and skeptics agree is on the need to give teen drivers as many hours as possible of supervised driving time before letting them out on their own. Even then, experts say, parents should seek to limit their risk factors, like nighttime trips and teenage passengers, both of which increase the chance of crashes.

Kristin Backstrom, president of the driver safety organization Safe Smart Women, recommends at least 100 hours of driving under parental supervision.

"It's not the skills. It's their willingness to take risks," she said. "It's something we can mitigate with more conversations and with more role modeling and more time in the car so they can really appreciate the risks of the road."

Limits on young drivers

Georgia law requires drivers under 18 to have at least 40 hours of driving with a parent or guardian, including at least six hours at night, to be licensed. If the teen has taken an approved driver's education course, the requirement drops to 20 supervised hours — six at night.

At the time of the state road test, the parent or guardian must sign an affidavit swearing that the teen has met the required supervised driving standard.

While Georgia law requires that teens wait 12 months from the time they first obtain their learner's permit to when they can test for their license, Thaxton, the crash investigator, made his oldest son drive under parental supervision for 18 months.

The state's graduated driver's license program, called the Teen and Adult Driver Responsibility Act, has been credited with lowering teen crash totals and has earned wide support. The law prohibits drivers under 18 from driving between midnight and 6 a.m. Also, for the first six months a driver has a license, he or she may not drive with any non-family passengers. After the first six months, no more than three non-family passengers under 21 are allowed in the car.

According to an Emory University study, since the law was enacted in 1997, the number of fatal crashes involving 16-year-old drivers in Georgia has decreased by more than a third.

But the law isn't effective when teens — and their parents — don't abide by its restrictions.

Of the six metro Atlanta fatal crashes involving teen drivers since May 24, four took place in conditions that violated the law's provisions. Since police can cite drivers for violations of the law only if they are pulled over for other reasons, officers call on parents to enforce the law.

"A parent has to be cognizant of that and enforce it as well as take into account that that's the minimum," said Bob Dallas, director of the Governor's Office of Highway Safety. "If you want your kid home at 10, it's your car, not his car."

The issue is personal to Dallas. He has a 16-year-old son eager to get his license.

"He wants to drive by himself," he said. "But I'm a parent like everybody else. The most dangerous thing that kid's going to do is get the keys and put it in the ignition."